Elliott Smith covering The Zombies

"Come up to get you, saved up for the train fair money. Kiss and make up, it would be so nice." Care of Cell 44. Sweetest song about, well, listen. This song is for Punk Rock Friday. Of course, it's Saturday, and it's not exactly Punk Rock, but Fuck you!

Bonus Elliott Smith, more Punk Rock; why, I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.
Chelsea Girls.

Bailout Retribution

Well, the bailout legislation passed-----all pimped out with pork too.

And maybe we had to pass it. It's like we were hostages being driven at breakneck speeds in a getaway car; if we grabbed the kidnapper's gun and shot him, weren't we also likely to be killed in the crash?

But let's not despair. There may be a redress. It's true that there is no clawback provision that will strip the unsavoury bankers of their unseemly incomes from the last several years, but what about changing estate taxes?

Americans typically are not in favor of these, but that is because they are mistakenly under the impression that these taxes will affect them. Now seems like a great time to push for taxing estates of over, say, $50 million or so at severely high rates. People (judging from those debate dials) are in the mood to punish greed and excess. Clearly the issues of trusts and other estate planning dodges will need to be addressed too.

Frankly, I've always been in favor of high estate taxes for the super wealthy. Spreading the wealth around is a great way to increase our overall sense of economic well-being; after all, what is the marginal utility of that billionth dollar?

Sarah Palin is sooo over Katic Couric

Ms. Palin explained that she stumbled in the Couric interviews not because she didn’t know the answers, but that she was annoyed with the interview because she thought the questions did not focus enough on the qualities needed in a vice president. She promised to try to be patient in the future.

From the NYT

And what would these qualities be, Sarah? Also, notice how all the blame is suddenly shifted to Katie? Sweeeet.

Party Time

It's Friday!
If you want a reminder how to act happy after a LONG week, you need look no further.
Allow me to introduce you to an award winning dance team, Skye Humphries (of Ithaca!) and Frida Segerdahl (from Sweden?)This is REAL Lindy Hop.

Enjoy this dance to a tune by jazz great, Fats Waller. (I suggest full screen for this.)



And here Frida and Sakarias strut their stuff with a fantastic charleston number. It can be slow to load, but it's worth it!


The great thing about Frida's dancing is the way she throws all of herself into it from head to toe. Wow.

Lowering the Bar----Special Limbo Edition

After disastrous interviews from Governor Sarah Palin, conservative columnist David Brooks seemed to reduce the qualifications for the Vice Presidency to the following:

Was this woman capable of completing an extemporaneous paragraph — a collection of sentences with subjects, verbs, objects and, if possible, an actual meaning?

Naturally he claims she passed this hurdle.

But many of us witnessed a dazzling shimmy right under this lowest of bars.

Remember, Brooks called for 'extemporaneous' speech, while pundits and viewers alike recognized her canned talking points. At the very outset she reserved for herself the right to ignore the questions and talk about....whatever, to make it easy to fall back on memorized scripts.

Complete, grammatical sentences could have been a little more frequent as well.

PALIN: My grandma was, my dad who is in the audience today, he's a schoolteacher, had been for many years. My brother, who I think is the best schoolteacher in the year, and here's a shout-out to all those third graders at Gladys Wood Elementary School, you get extra credit for watching the debate.
Education credit in American has been in some sense in some of our states just accepted to be a little bit lax and we have got to increase the standards.

Which reminds me, then there's that pesky requirement about being meaningful.

PALIN: My experience as an executive will be put to good use as a mayor and business owner and oil and gas regulator and then as governor of a huge state, a huge energy producing state that is accounting for much progress towards getting our nation energy independence and that's extremely important.

But it wasn't just that experience tapped into, it was my connection to the heartland of America. Being a mom, one very concerned about a son in the war, about a special needs child, about kids heading off to college, how are we going to pay those tuition bills?

But let's not be too harsh criticizing Palin for ducking rather than clearing the hurdles. This former track star thought she was supposed to play a totally new, different game.

Joe Biden is a mensch, Sarah Palin; unspecified reform,

Maverick maverick maverick, golly gee. Sarah just can't believe that a man could be a single parent. Actually, I'm pretending to be nice. She's a sociopath, just like Bush and Cheney. Lovely, America. My oldest came home yesterday from five weeks in Europe. Her first words? "We're a third world country." Yep, thanks, Reagan, Bush, Bush, and McCain, should he get the chance.



Not on the clip, but did you see her wink at the camera, or am I hallucinating? And, raise your hand, everyone, who thinks she doesn't have a clue what "Achilles heel" means.

Here's what Joe Biden was responding to--Sarah (the mean girl we all knew and avoided in High School) assuming that a man had no clue about Life As We Know It.

But it wasn't just that experience tapped into, it was my connection to the heartland of America. Being a mom, one very concerned about a son in the war, about a special needs child, about kids heading off to college, how are we going to pay those tuition bills?

(I stole the Unspecified Reform line from someone at Daily Kos.) Thanks!

I'm Shocked, Shocked To Find That Incivility Is Going On In Here

Longtime conservative columnist, Kathleen Parker wrote last week asking Sarah Palin to bow out from the ticket. She has since received a mountain of hate mail and now professes to understand the Dixie Chicks' frustration at being targeted for expressing personal convictions. (She also lost a profitable conservative speaking gig, so now she really appreciates the power of right wing enforcement.)

In fact she now proclaims :

…when we decide that a person is a traitor and should die for having an opinion different from one’s own, we cross into territory that puts all freedoms at risk.

So maybe she does get it. AT LONG LAST!

Conservatives have accused liberals of figurative viciousness, but conservatives seem to have the edge in that as well as the literal variety. Kathleen Parker is now receiving actual threats from Conservatives in addition to the expressed wish that Parker herself had been aborted all those years ago. ( How do you like that for sticking with one's principles?)

From Blue Texan at firedoglake (source for the great pic above too) we have the following:

So let's review: Parker flings two decades worth of poo at liberals, including the suggestion that the entire field of Democratic presidential nominees [2004] be assassinated, and never reports getting hateful vicious threats. She then writes a single column suggesting Sarah Palin should step down and receives a box full' o' hate.

The big surprise in all of this is that Parker is surprised by the hate, after all those years spent mongering, herself. And I thought all conservatives knew about that sewing and reaping thing.

Bailing out the Crooks

According to the New York Times, Henry Paulson (Secretary of the Treasury), remember him, the guy who said "Give me 700 BILLION DOLLARS or this nice little economy you have here gets it", bailed out AIG (the PRIVATE insurer) because of the risk AIG's bankruptcy posed to Paulson's former firm (he was the chairman) Goldman Sachs, where he made a cool 700 Million (no typo).

So, our Secretary of the Treasury is using the Treasury, you know, the UNITED STATES treasury as his own little piggy bank to help out his needy, yet obscenely wealthy friends. Hey, I could use some help, how about it? For extra fun, read the addendum on the NYT article which mentions that Paulson didn't attend ALL of the meetings that dealt with the AIG bailout, just some of them. Well, that makes everything just peachy now, doesn't it.

Bailout-we're giving the money to the people who caused the problem.

According to that most liberal of papers, the Wall Street Journal, 80% (got that? four/fifths) of the subprime loans -- the underlying reason for the ginormous bailout package were caused by deliberate frauds by finance industry insiders.

From the article:

Most of the mistakes for which we are paying now, Mr. Black told me, were actually made "by four entities that under conservative economic theory should have exercised effective market discipline -- the appraisers, the originators of the mortgages, the rating agencies, and the investment banking firms that packaged the subprime mortgage-backed securities." Instead of "disciplining" the markets, these private actors "served as the four horsemen of the financial apocalypse, aiding the accounting fraud and inflating the housing bubble." It is they, Mr. Black says, who "turned a crisis into a catastrophe."
...

There is no way to measure the number of people who took out mortgages they knew they couldn't afford, of course, but for what it's worth, a 2007 report by the Mortgage Bankers Association reports that the FBI estimates "80 percent of all reported fraud losses arise from fraud for profit schemes that involve industry insiders." That means the lenders, not the borrowers.

Read the whole thing here: The GOP Blames the Victim

Fruit Fly Fallout After Nuking Incident

Maybe the bad Karma doesn't wait for the next life.

Perhaps people will think that I deserve whatever I get for being so uncaring in my efforts to purge my kitchen of fruit flies. But when I opted for the microwave, remember, I was defending my home. I looked around my kitchen, desperate for a non-toxic way of keeping those inscrutable invaders away (dead).
Is nuking them in the microwave so much crueler than spraying them with a deadly neuro-toxin (like Hitler), or leaving them to starve on a sticky strip (like Pol Pot)? Aren't those other traps really just a way of pretending you are not killing them, but (like Milosevic) just relocating them------into the trap? And isn't keeping a clean kitchen just yet another way of starving them slowly to death (like Stalin)?

And hey, I never actually chased them around with the brulee torch; I was just brainstorming. And I DID feed them in the microwave.

In any event, whether it's my husband's Jewish background with his attendant aversion for using ovens for the disposal of unwanted populations, or his longstanding vegetarian leanings, my husband is appalled. Furthermore, he is now unwilling to eat anything from the microwave, even though I cleaned it thoroughly.

So what I need now is a way to 'ritually cleanse' the microwave after it's misuse.......sigh.

Heck, maybe I'll just leave the critters alone. After all, now that I see that they read more newspapers than Sarah Palin, I have a new found respect for them. In fact, I think I'll treat them to some wine.

Sarah Palin has a talent!

WARNING -- CHRISTIAN ROCK -- WARNING

But you can see our Vice-Presidential candidate not making a fool of herself on the camera, except for the whole Christian Rock thingie--oh, never mind.

Thank Goodness Things Like This Don't Ever Happen In Real Life

Some wise Chinese guy once said, "Voters don't determine outcome of elections; people who count votes determine outcome." (Do people in China vote?)
Don't believe everything you read. ( And thank goodness for Google!)

Stalin said that.

President or Dictator

McCain calls on Bush to spend 1 trillion dollars----that's $1,000,000,000,000-----without seeking Congressional approval.

So much for a return to limited executive power, and checks and balances.



I thank Jed Lewison of the Huffington Post for the following quote .

This is the same John McCain who just a couple of days ago was railing on the $1 trillion price tag of the bailout (when it was actually $700 billion).

But just a few days after railing against the unbridled power of government, McCain now seems to envision the presidency as a dictatorship. He now thinks that Bush should just spend $1 trillion without allowing anyone to ask any questions -- and he supports doing it just one day after the House of Representatives voted down a $700 billion bailout.

This won't surprise anyone on the left. The question I have is this: when are conservatives going to wake up and realize that despite all his bluster about being a conservative, the Republican nominee for president has proposed the single largest expenditure in the history of this nation -- and that he's proposed that it be made without the approval of Congress?

I Never Thought I'd Say We Need More Yes Men

Portlanders can check out the subversive art of the Yes Men, Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum.



The Yes Men
Keep it Slick
PNCA's Feldman Gallery and Project Space, 1241 NW Johnson
through Oct 26

For more info, visit the Portland Mercury site Here

All that's standing between Sarah and the Presidency

A gay best friend!

Should Sarah Choose Jeff, (Contestant number 1),


Or Dan, (Contestant number 2).


Oh, if any of our reader(s) are not reading Dan Savage, get yourself there, now, girlfriend!

A late contestant, Danielle, but one who makes some very good points!


"I can play hockey with your sons and I can date your daughter Bristol, and I won't even get her pregnant!"